Product Wheel Designer Overview

Phenix’s Product Wheel Designer is a sequential approach to designing an operating strategy to meet your organizational objectives. Every organization must balance the trade-off between three essential elements of strategy:

• Customer service

• Inventory

• Operating efficiency

Phenix uses a consistent data structure and set of master data throughout the design and scheduling process so that you can be confident that the operating strategy is achievable.

Through each step in the design process, algorithms and simulations are running in the background to calculate optimum production frequencies for each product, resulting changeover and efficiency impact, inventory required, and the total costs of the operating strategy.

The Phenix Product Wheel Designer takes you through the following steps:

1. Setup: Select organizational objectives; collect the data on customer service goals, cost of goods sold, and production and sales variability; choose the lines and materials to include in the design; validate the master data.

2. Characteristics (Phenix Material Attributes): Select the product characteristics (or Material Attributes) that relate to changeovers and operating efficiency; sort these by importance; define an ideal sequence for all products assuming infinite capacity and no time constraints.

   1. While the ideal sequence may not be executable in practice, it sets a benchmark for the remainder of the design process, and sections of the ideal will be used to sequence product families and individual production lines.

3. Families: Define product families based on material characteristics; outline a best sequence in which these families could be run; decide what order you actually want to run the families in.

4. Allocation: Allocate families and then products to production lines, with a view of products that will run well together, the capacity required to run each product, and the total capacity available on each Line.

5. Design: Establish a per-line ideal sequence; calculate run frequencies and quantities to optimize efficiency, setting these values according to your cost/cash/service goals; allocate production to the cycles of the Product Wheel and make final changes to the Product Wheel sequence based on your knowledge of your scenario.

6. Review: Visualize the Product Wheel you’ve created, along with a broad range of other relevant data such as capacity utilization, inventory levels, and more.

For an in-depth walkthrough, see Product Wheel Designer.